Most bars exist on a spectrum from competent to excellent. These 20 do not. They are sui generis: each one is so specific in its concept, location, or approach that no direct comparison exists. We have visited all of them. Several required significant effort to reach. What unites them is not quality of cocktails or design, though many excel at both. What unites them is the fact that nowhere else in the world is doing exactly this.
Ice Bar — Stockholm
Carved entirely from ice every November, dismantled every spring. The temperature inside is held at minus 5 degrees Celsius. Thermal suits are provided at the door. Everything from the bar to the glasses is ice. The experience is not comfortable. It is theatrical, temporary, and designed specifically to make you aware of the fact that you are drinking inside a sculpture. The bar has operated for 20 years using the same formula, which suggests the formula is correct.
Minus 5 Ice Bar — Multiple Cities
If Ice Bar in Stockholm proved the concept, Minus 5 expanded it into a commercial franchise now operating in New York, Las Vegas, and Auckland. Ice sculptures, ice glasses, ice stools. The novelty wears off faster than at the original, but the experience remains genuinely unusual and worth experiencing once.
Icefjord Centre Bar — Ilulissat, Greenland
The world's northernmost serious cocktail bar. Drinks are served overlooking a UNESCO World Heritage glacier. You can step outside and watch icebergs calving. The isolation is extreme, which makes the fact that they have a cocktail menu at all seem improbable. The location itself is the entire concept.
Thriller Bar — Edinburgh
A Victorian anatomy theatre converted into a cocktail bar. Drinks are named after 19th-century medical procedures. The walls are lined with medical diagrams and skeletal displays. It is tasteless and committed to its tastelessness, which somehow makes it work. The history of the space is not erased but repurposed.
Library Bar — Hoxton Hotel, London
Two hundred paperback books on the shelves, all available to take. An honesty bar with no staff. You mix your own drink and leave payment. The concept is so simple it seems impossible that it works, which makes the fact that it works remarkable. This is a bar built on trust.
saturate(0.85))
PDT (Please Don't Tell) — New York, East Village
Enter through a phone booth inside a hot dog shop. The entrance is so obscure that the bar has maintained its exclusivity through pure physical difficulty. Reservation only. The speakeasy concept has been copied thousands of times. The original, which made the format famous, remains the best. For a deeper look at bars that take underground literally, our guide to the most underground bars in the world covers 12 basement and below-street venues from New York to Tokyo to Vienna.
Floating Bar — Amsterdam
A brown café on a permanently moored houseboat in the Jordaan canal. Accessible only by a narrow bridge or a small boat. The location creates a sense of separation from the city. You have left Amsterdam by crossing a bridge that measures three meters. The Dutch are excellent at making you feel like you have escaped.
Smugglers' Cove — San Francisco
550 rum labels. Three floors of pirate-shipwreck interior design. Not ironic. Completely committed to the concept. A bar that has chosen a direction and walked straight down it without asking whether the direction made sense. It makes sense because of the commitment.
Jimmy's Bar — Hong Kong
20th-floor bar in a 1970s hotel. Never renovated. Unchanged since 1977. The world's best accidental time capsule. You are drinking in a preserved moment, which is a kind of tourism that appeals only to people who think about time constantly. It appeals to those people intensely.
28 HongKong Street — Singapore
14 seats. No menu. You describe what you want. Entry by reservation, no social media presence. The bar is deliberately impossible to find unless you know where to look. This is a bar designed to exclude, which is why it is so desirable. The scarcity is not accidental.
The Blind Spot — Melbourne
Behind a laundromat. The entry code changes weekly. Deliberately impossible to find on your first visit. Deliberately difficult on your second. The bar owner has decided that mystery is more valuable than discoverability, which is a choice that most bars would not make.
Szimpla Kert — Budapest
The original ruin bar. An abandoned factory became the template for an entire bar genre that now exists in every major city. The original remains the best because it arrived before the concept had been codified. It set the rules, which means it cannot be confined by them.
Bar Benfiddich — Tokyo
One bartender. No substitutions. Herbs grown on the roof. The most focused bar programme in the world. The bartender remembers every customer. There is nowhere to hide from the attention. This is hospitality taken to its logical extreme.
Casa Mezcal — Oaxaca, Mexico
A working mezcal distillery with a bar in the production room. You watch your drink being made. The concept sounds simple. The execution is extraordinary. You are not just consuming a product. You are witnessing the making of it in real time.
High Line Hotel Bar — New York
A 19th-century seminary with a courtyard bar that feels completely separate from the city. You could be anywhere in the world. The building predates everything around it, which gives you the sense that you have travelled back in time without leaving New York.
Under — Lindesnes, Norway
Europe's largest underwater restaurant with a bar section. Five metres below the surface of the North Sea. Windows look out at the ocean floor. You are sitting in a submerged structure drinking in an environment that should not be habitable. The novelty is genuine.
The Tasting Room — Stellenbosch, South Africa
A wine estate bar carved into the side of a mountain. Accessed by a lift through bedrock. The location is so improbable that the concept sells itself. You are standing in a room that was constructed by removing stone from beneath a vineyard.
Rum Bar — Amsterdam
400 rum labels. The ceiling is made from rum bottles. Dutch trance plays at volumes that seem counterproductive to conversation. The bar is excessive and self-aware about its excessiveness. It is fun in a way that thoughtfulness cannot achieve.
Archipelago Bar — Stockholm
A bar on an island accessible only by ferry from June to September. By late October, the bar returns to the mainland until the ice melts again. The bar's very existence is seasonal, which means you cannot visit it at will. Scarcity is built into the concept.
The bars worth going to, weekly.
One email, every Friday. Our editors’ top bar picks across 60+ cities — places worth the detour.
Related Articles
saturate(0.85))
saturate(0.85))
saturate(0.85))